East Meets West Bookclub: Book One

The first book I would like to examine is a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson called "The Years of Rice and Salt," a book about the consequences and the lives of many people in a world where the Black Plague wiped out most of Europe's population in the fourteenth century.

I am planning to come back in a month to talk about this book and see how much progress has been made. It is a very long book, over 700 pages, so it will take some time to finish this book. I am hoping that this book will open up the eyes of the West to what might have happened with Buddhism and Islam being the major world religions and promulgators of culture, and what it might tell us about what is in store for the West in the future with a greater interaction with Eastern and Middle Eastern philosophies and societies.

Plato

I was hoping I could also start a bookclub online through this blog where books relating to Western Philosophy and books relating to Eastern Philosophy are examined and talked about. I think this would be a positive thing because it would enable a bridge of dialogue to form between two parts of the world that have been in constant struggle for the entirety of human history.

More coming soon...

There will be more coming to this blog soon, but I'm in the process of organizing topics and gaining permissions for material usage. Some of the topics you can expect will be discussed in this blog in the future will be:

-Secularism and Religion
-Oil
-Capitalism and the Progress of Democracy
-Life
-Science
-Disease
-Political Reformation

and much more!

First Post

Welcome to the Commoner's blog!

The hope of this blog is to expand the dialogue on issues facing the world, from science to religion, and everywhere in between.